» HADOUKEN « machines shouldn't worry you, humanity should
"Everything that lives is designed to end. We are perpetually trapped in a never-ending spiral of life and death. Is this a curse? Or some kind of punishment? I often think about the god who blessed us with this cryptic puzzle...and wonder if we'll ever get the chance to kill him."
What happens when a machine's purpose is so utterly and ultimately accomplished? When it has become clearly redundant? When there are no more juices to blend, coffees to brew, clothes to manufacture, delivery trucks to automate or "similar products" to suggest?
The above quote, from the opening scene of 2017 instant-classic video game NieR: Automata, sets the stage for wrestling with those very questions. Set amidst a proxy war between machines sent by alien life forms to decimate humanity and androids tasked with protecting their (unbeknownst to them) already extinct fleshy predecessors, NieR is equal parts Nietzsche and Shirow--a bleak, dystopian tour de force that studies our past, thinks critically about our present and worries about our future. Among its many philosophical anti-questions, at the very center is this concept of recognizing purpose and the complete chaos that results from, oddly enough, achieving it.
When God is dead (or, when all the humans are gone) what will the machines do? Is it fair to compare humanity to God when it comes to artificial intelligence creationism? Is Watson indeed Adam? Have humans indeed "killed" God? And will machines ultimately "kill" humans?
I guess you can say that my two-month hiatus got me thinking reeaaallllyyyy big picture for this week's "fashion" newsletter! And the timing could not be better: within the last two weeks, we've seen Amazon's patent for "on-demand manufacturing," adidas' unveiling of plans to produce the first 3D printed sneaker at real scale by the end of next year and Oracle's incorporating real AI insights into its consumer-facing cloud products. In short, we are standing at the precipice, or maybe even firmly entrenched in the first few years, of a digital industrial revolution.
Just think, the Playstation 4 I used to play NieR has more computational processing power than a military supercomputer from 1997.
In 20 short years, look how far we've come. And if you think this will slow down or plateau, I must simply question your sanity. Unlike the human brain, over time, computers become more efficient and "learn" at a much quicker clip, gobbling up terabytes of information (hell, some massive categorization of "bytes" to which we've yet to slap a prefix) and increasing output and capability by a ridiculous multiple. It's like compound interest, for Christ's sake! By any purely logical standard, every wunder-invention you've heard about within the last few years will actually be here quicker than even the most aggressive forecasts originally predicted.
So what does this all mean for fashion? Quite a bit, actually. But instead of embarking down the futile path of trying to explore those possibilities in a couple-hundred-word newsletter, I will use my time to encourage you to "get smart" on the matter. Read articles, go to conferences, take meetings, watch instructional videos. Think critically. Be excited. Understand the amount of wealth and free time these advancements can bring to society--how we should be the first epoch with the definitive ability to end hunger, provide shelter and generally increase the world's quality of life 1000 fold.
That's if we can avoid making ourselves redundant in the meantime. Because what will all those poor machines do with no juices to blend, coffees to brew, clothes to manufacture, delivery trucks to automate or "similar products" to suggest if we're all gone?